The Astrological Imagination: Where Psyche and Cosmos Meet

By Brad Hiljanen Kochunas

Many books today simply widen the field of astrology by promoting newly created techniques or championing older historical methods for investigating every possible nook and cranny of a horoscope. In contrast, this award winning writer points the reader in a new direction toward deepening the way that we approach and think about astrology in these post modern times. Drawing upon the archetypal perspectives of Mircea Eliade, James Hillman, and Thomas Moore, the author presents a truly psychological astrology, an astrology of soul that can plumb the depths of our being, sounding out our centers in a manner that enriches our struggle to fully engage what it means to be human.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Oct 2, 2008
• ISBN: 9780595631681

Brad Hiljanen Kochunas

Brad Kochunas is a licensed counselor and certified astrologer who has spent his career in prison mental health integrating counseling and astrology in his approach to helping people. He has presented at numerous astrology and counseling conferences and maintains a limited practice in Middletown, OH. He can be reached via email at [e-mail]. Author photo credited to G. Crooks

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Copyright © 2008 by Bradley Kochunas

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Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

A Sacred Cosmos

Returning Soul to Astrology

Why Astrology Works

Reimagining Astrology in a Therapeutic Setting

Reclaiming Lunacy

Touched by the Gods

Living in the 12th House

Images of Midlife

Freedom From Happiness

Living an Astrological Life

Astrology Reimagined:

Uranus in Pisces

Readings for a Grounding

in Imagination

About the Author

For family and friends,

especially,

Marjorie, Abigail, and Brendan.

The final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else. The exquisite truth is to know that it is a fiction and that you believe in it willingly. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous

Each moment is precipitated out of the fullness of Holy Imagination. Each birth announces the presence of the Sacred. The author

Acknowledgments

Many fine astrologers have inspired and encouraged me in my thinking about astrology. I am indebted to Glenn Perry, Ph. D., Greg Bogart, Ph. D., Michael Lutin, Donna Van Toen, Richard Smoot, Andrea Conlon, Tem Tarriktar, Nan Geary, Chris McRae, Monica Dimino, and Joe Landwehr. I’m also grateful to James Hillman, Thomas Moore, Patrick Harpur, and Robert Romanyshyn for their imaginal perspectives and to Dane Rudhyar, Mircea Eliade, Joseph Campbell, Matthew Fox, and Alan Watts for deepening my life. Last, a special thanks to the Firesign Theatre, The Band, and the Grateful Dead for turning the key.

Introduction

This book is a collection of essays expressing an unconventional way of thinking about astrology as a truly imaginal and archetypal discipline. Many of the essays have been published in a variety of popular periodicals and professional journals. They have been gathered together at the request of numerous readers seeking a single location for them. Hopefully this book honors that request and remedies the situation.

The following essays are self contained. They focus upon deepening our understanding of astrology. They explore astrology’s relation to the Sacred and describe astrology in Thomas Moore’s phrase as a poetics of imagination. They do not follow one another in a developing line of thought. You may pick and choose as you please. Some have overlapping content but this factor should serve more to reinforce than to detract from the particular perspective within which they are written. They range from the lengthy and scholarly to the short and popular. Much of the available astrological material on the market is either too simplistic or so oddly esoteric that it requires belief in other matters such as reincarnation, embodied souls, karma, planetary rays, physical influences, and the like. What follows is an effort to deliteralize the topic so that we are able to view astrology as one example of humanity’s numerous and rich forms of imagining.

For many astrologers practicing today, astrology has nothing to do with star constellations and their supposed influences on human life. Nor does it have anything to do with fortune telling and the prediction of concrete events. Astrology is viewed more as a tool for exploration, discovery, and the creation of a meaningful life. Over the last twenty years, an increasing number of mental health professionals have been using astrology in their work with clients. I am one of them.

The first essay, the most scholarly of the collection, takes an overview of astrology and looks at it through the lens of the methodology of the late historian of religions, Mircea Eliade, seeking the religious dimensions within contemporary astrology especially as promoted by Dane Rudhyar. The second essay, Returning Soul to Astrology, argues for the need to bring a more soulful approach to the practice of astrology if it is to have value in the postmodern era. It relies on the thinking of the archetypal theorists, James Hillman and Thomas Moore to establish its position. Chapter three, Why Astrology Works is a rhetorical piece championing the idea that astrology works because it satisfies deep aesthetic and existential needs within us for mystery and connectedness to Life. The fourth essay examines the possibility of using astrology in a counseling context as a therapeutic modality. Reclaiming Lunacy is a look at how culture has been dominated for centuries by solar values and offers a revaluation of lunar realities as a way toward a life of wholeness. The sixth essay, Touched by the Gods, is an imaginative look at psychopathology. The intent is to soften our view of mental and emotional problems with an eye toward uncovering the treasures they conceal. Chapter seven is perhaps the most technical piece in the collection. It is an astrological case history of a man serving time for murder and how his situation can be seen through an astrological perspective. The next essay, Images in Midlife is one man’s excursion through the trials of midlife transition. His travail is imagined along astrological lines with a view toward the parallelism of human and cosmic rhythms during this important time. Chapter nine explores our fascination with happiness from an astrological frame introducing the idea that our very searching for happiness is the precise cause of our discontent. Chapter ten, Living an Astrological Life contends that our lives seem out of synchrony with the world that sustains us and the suggestion is offered that it would be useful to once again regain a sense of awareness of the natural rhythms within and about us. The last essay examines the passage of Uranus through Pisces and what that may mean for us as astrologers.

DEFINING ASTROLOGY

Astrology is a fiction, that is, I think it’s fair to say that the claims of astrology have little reliable basis in scientific fact. We will proceed by engaging astrology as fantasy, as if it were true. When we understand that its real concern is not the provision of eternal verities but the fostering of new vistas leading us ever deeper into ourselves and our world, then we will discover its authentic value. Astrology is an exercise of the imagination. It has more in common with art and religion than with reason and science. Astrology works in the fashion of great drama, lyric, and narrative. To evaluate it in terms of the scientific method is to apply the wrong tool for the task. The poet, Wallace Stevens (1989) wrote:

Things that have their origin in the imagination or in the emotions (poems) very often have meanings that differ in nature from the meanings of things that have their origin in reason…. In short, things that have their origin in the imagination or in the emotions very often take on a form that is ambiguous or uncertain. It is not possible to attach a single, rational meaning to such things without destroying the imaginative or emotional ambiguity or uncertainty that is inherent in them… (p. 249).

Rationalism, reductionism, empiricism and positivism will forever fault astrology, and if our allegiance is to these gods only, then we too will find little value in astrology. However, if we are willing to bracket our disbelief, putting it aside just for the moment, and courageously immerse ourselves in fictions and uncertainties, perhaps then astrology will become a psychopoesis, a way of soul-making, a path toward enrichment.

Astrology has arisen in every major civilization over the last 5000 years. We find it represented in Hindu, Chinese, MesoAmerican, Greek, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Arabic, Roman, and European cultures, but what do we mean when we say, astrology? From the literary evidence of these cultures it appears that astrology had something to do with a perceived and significant relationship between the movements in the heavens and life on earth. This has been summarized by the Hermetic axiom, As above, so below.

Western astrology originated in ancient Mesopotamia, was refined by the Greeks, adopted by the Romans, infused with Arabic thinking, developed further within European culture, and has been a part of the American landscape since colonial times.

The term, astrology, derives from the Greek, astron and logos. Logos means speech, words, or an account, the term, astron, refers to stars. We might imagine astrology then as an accounting or the speech of the stars in their relations to human existence. Astrology addresses many areas of human experience. There are agricultural forms of astrology, meteorological, mundane (dealing with geopolitical events), horary (astrology for the moment a question is posed), electional (divining the most opportune time to start an enterprise), financial, and natal (dealing with the individual person).

Our concern here will be natal astrology, the kind of astrology with which most people are familiar. On its most trivial level, this is the newspaper sun sign column. On a deeper level, it’s a philosophical system, a perspective for viewing one’s life. There are also several specialties within natal astrology; medical, vocational, locational, spiritual, predictive, and psychological. There are also different schools of natal astrology; cosmobiological, harmonic, uranian, heliocentric, and humanistic. This book is an introduction to a psychological astrology whose major concern is with psyche or soul.

Having said the above, let’s take astrology even a step deeper. Astrology is a form of imagination, a way of organizing human reality that we should take seriously but not literally. Astrology spins several fantasies about what it means to be human. The first is that, each person is the center of their own experiential universe. The second, that time and space are not simply homogenous but qualitatively different, that is, that the time and place of one’s birth matters. Third, that every individual is a unique configuration of the larger world. Astrology provides a framework for imagining a profound intimacy between ourselves and our environment. It envisions an ecological model of humanity viewing people as interdependent expressions of a living cosmos, a cosmos which speaks through symbol and metaphor. The same structuring principles and processes at work in the natural world are also at work in us, allowing us to see form and movement in our lives as metaphorically reflected in the movements of the sky. The primary tool in astrology is the natal chart. It is from this that all the fantasies about the person are drawn. What follows is a brief introduction to the natal chart and its components.

THE NATAL CHART

The natal or birth chart is a stylized map of the heavens as seen from the place of our birth at the time we were born. In addition to displaying the location of the Sun, Moon, and planets in the sky at the moment of first breath, it is also imagined as a map of our inner landscape, the topography of our psychic life. It is an image first and foremost of psyche or soul. As a map it can be used for purposes of orientation, helping us discover something about where we are in life, about finding our center, and getting our bearings.

Our first breath at the time of birth, when we miraculously transform from water breathing creatures to air breathing beings, establishes a certain rhythm of relationship with the larger environment in which we are situated. We bring the qualities of moment and place into life in the same manner that a fine wine reflects the season and geography of its origin. The natal chart is comprised of four basic symbol sets referred to as planetary symbolism, zodiac symbolism, house symbolism, and aspect symbolism, furnishing us with a relatively coherent and complex system of metaphors for exploring personality, development, and experience. The origins of the meanings of the symbolism in astrology are lost to antiquity, though much of their meaning derives from Greek and Roman mythology.

The natal chart mirrors and echoes how we are as persons and is not the cause of what we have (or will) become. It is simply an imaginal reflection of how we perceive and organize reality. As a map of our inner landscape, an image of soul, it is fathomless. The natal chart is labyrinthine in complexity allowing us to draw deeply on imagination. Exploring the chart need not be a one time occasion. As we spiral into different places in our lives, these archetypal images continue to rise and set reflecting developmental challenges and aims. The cycling of planets imagined as movements of soul suggests the survival of sacred order in secular times. They provide a touchstone for the poetic imagination to reach out and elaborate an intimacy between our selves and our world. Astrology is best not used to predict concrete life events or to provide solutions to the problems of living, rather it asks us to explore the various fantasies in which we’re engaged and perhaps may lead us toward a life deeply enriched, eminently human, and possessed of satisfying attachments.

THE PLANETS

One of the ways we can imagine ourselves is as a rich entwining of all the energies available in this particular moment and at this particular time, as weavings perhaps, tapestries of mystery. Who are the